


An Ounce of Prevention

by the_wordbutler



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Grant Ward learns a Life Lesson, Handwavy Marvel Pseudo-Science, Mental Health Issues, Mission Fic, Original Character(s), People with Abilities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-01
Updated: 2014-01-01
Packaged: 2018-01-07 01:52:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1114122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_wordbutler/pseuds/the_wordbutler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a group called the Normalizers starts killing people with abilities by hawking a false cure, Grant Ward and the rest of Coulson’s team head to rural Illinois to consult with a famous but elusive geneticist.</p><p>Grant expects it will be just an ordinary mission.  What he finds is something else entirely.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Ounce of Prevention

**Author's Note:**

> This story is born primarily of me wondering how certain aspects of broader Marvel universe—and certain characters from that universe—might be able to appear in the MCU without violating any pesky contract rights. I am not sure it lives up to its original goal, but it's something. 
> 
> I know nothing about science or medicine. Please consult your “Marvel’s Guide to Handwavy Pseudo-Science” for more details. 
> 
> Trigger warning for some violent but non-graphic background deaths (discussed, not witnessed, by the characters) and untactful discussion of mental health issues.
> 
> Thanks as always to Jen and saranoh, who are always willing to read my stories, whether they are AUs or strange mission-fics that hopped out of my brain fully-formed.

The mission starts, as most of their missions do, with a mad scientist who’s hunting down people with powers and—

“Wait, in English?” Grant asks.

Fitz-Simmons roll their eyes in perfect unison. They’re gathered around the display table for a briefing that involves too much jargon and too few single-syllable words. Leaning against the nearest wall, May smirks and crosses her arms over her chest.

Coulson, on the other hand, just sighs. “He’s exploiting their powers,” he explains, and waves a hand at Skye. A few finger-taps later, and the wall behind the team’s two scientists bursts alive with a dozen different images of smoldering, smashed, or otherwise destroyed buildings. He presses his palms against the edge of the table and leans in a few inches. “Raina and the Clairvoyant aren’t the only people interested in people with abilities, anymore.”

One of the images shifts from a still to grainy CCTV footage, and Grant watches as lightning strikes a ten-foot circle around the shadow of a man before engulfing him. When it starts to replay at the beginning, the first lightning cracking white on the grayed-out video, Simmons glances at one wall and Fitz at the other. 

Coulson wets his lips. “Some of the people on our Index are harmless,” he says after a few moments. “They’re innocent, born with powers they can’t control. We bring them in, train them or help them control it, but others are—” He shakes his head. “This new group finds vulnerable people and amps up their powers until they overload.”

“They call themselves the Normalizers,” Skye explains. She closes out a bunch of the images to pull up a series of webpages. When Grant ducks down to rest his elbows on the table, she shoots him a nasty look until he stands up again. He mirrors Coulson’s stance, instead. “They’re like the worst kind of web troll, throwing their links up on every social media site and YouTube video they can find.” She gestures limply toward the table. “They don’t just want to wipe out the people with powers—which, by the way, would be creepy enough for my taste—but they want to—”

The words escape her, and she shrugs her shoulders. 

“They want to watch the world burn,” May says quietly from her wall. Her face is stony, devoid of any kind of emotion. At the display table, though, Coulson frowns enough for the both of them. 

“But how?” Grant presses, and Fitz-Simmons stop staring at their respective corners of the room to blink at him. He shrugs. “Everyone we’ve met with volatile powers got that way because of Centipede or some other kind of meddling.” He straightens up, resting his hands on his hips. “How can these Normalizers overload their circuits until they become human lightning rods?”

Skye scowls at him. “Are you physically capable of human emotion? Because from over here, you just sound like a big tool.”

Grant snorts at her, shaking his head, and glances over at Fitz-Simmons. In the five seconds it’s taken Skye to insult him, they’ve devolved into one of their silent conversations. He waits through prolonged eye contact, tiny head-jerks, and one of Simmons’s most long-suffering sighs before they both twist back in his direction. 

When he raises his eyebrows, Simmons sighs again. “It’s a form of genetic manipulation,” she explains. She sweeps her hand across the table, and suddenly Skye’s websites are replaced with complicated chemical compounds, graphs, and equations Grant can’t hope to understand. Coulson straightens up and crosses his arms, but his eyes never leave the display. “The bits that we managed to recover from the site in Brunei—”

“Wait,” Grant interrupts, holding up a hand. He shifts to glance at Coulson. The man holds himself as steady as a statue. “ _That’s_ why we were in Brunei? I thought we were recovering that—”

“Anti-electron field manipulator,” Fitz supplies. 

“—thing,” Grant finishes. When he glances across the table at the two scientists, Fitz immediately starts manipulating one of Simmons’s equations. He flips it upside down before Grant sighs. “I’m just going to stop asking,” he warns.

“To be fair,” Coulson supplies, “we were multitasking. At the time, it looked like an isolated incident.”

“More like an isolated explosion,” May provides, the corner of her mouth kicking upward.

“Whatever the case,” Simmons presses, her jaw and fake smile both extremely tense, “Fitz and I ran analyses on some of the debris and discovered something quite interesting.” She nudges Fitz, and he expands one of the graphs until it takes up most of the display. “As I understand these individuals with powers—at least, as much as one _can_ understand individuals with powers as a group, given that each power brings with it its own unique metabolic signature and attributes that you can’t _possibly_ start to generalize—”

“English,” Grant and Skye say together.

Simmons rolls her eyes. “People with powers have different immune systems from the rest of us,” she translates. She gestures to the graph. “Certain immunoglobulins and cytokine receptors work differently for them than for the rest of us. It’s a bit like how you might be allergic to peanuts while the person next to you is allergic to shellfish, only much more complicated.” She elbows Fitz, and he flips to a new graph. “As far as we can tell, the people being targeted by the Normalizers are being injected with something to normalize their immune system, and that in turn is causing them to, well, explode.”

She raises her hands and spreads out her fingers, mimicking a firecracker, and holds them there until Fitz elbows her in the side. She drops them to the tabletop and folds them tightly. Grant presses his lips together. “If they’re trying to normalize their immune systems, then—”

“They’re hawking a cure,” Coulson provides. He leans forward, arms on the table, and nobody stops him. “In every region there’s been an incident like this, there’s also been a major increase in the persecution of people with these kinds of abilities. And when you stick out like a sore thumb—”

“You want a way to blend in,” Grant finishes, nodding.

“It’d actually be quite brilliant were it not so exceedingly underhanded and really very destructive,” Simmons offers. When she realizes that everyone’s staring at her, she flushes bright pink right up to her hairline. “Not the Normalizers and their horrible method of murdering innocent people! I mean their formula.” She enlarges one of the equations and then steps away from the display table so she can gesture at the screen. “There are certain elements of their normalization formula that could potentially work as a temporary cure were it not for the whole ‘being hell-bent on destroying a whole new species of human people’ bit. We could offer a lot of temporary relief to people with uncontrolled powers if we tweaked it _just_ a bit.” She nods to Fitz, and he sweeps his hand over the tabletop until all the formulas and charts disappear. When she returns to the table, it’s to shrug. “I’m just not familiar enough with this particular brand of genetics to hazard a guess at _how_.” 

“Luckily, I happen to know a genetics expert who specializes in this kind of work.” Coulson taps his knuckles against the tabletop and the display blinks off. His eyes sweep across the group; by the time Grant follows his gaze, he realizes that May’s already slipped out of the room. “We’re heading to Peoria.”

Across the table, Fitz-Simmons gasp in perfect unison. “Peoria?” Skye demands. She plants one hand on her hip and cocks her head at Coulson. “As in _will it play in Peoria_? As in _Illinois_?”

Something about her rising indignation brings a tiny grin to Coulson’s face. “Actually, it’s Illinois’s seventh most populous city,” he says. “And it’s also the home of one Doctor McCoy.”

And Grant wants to ask for more information, but then Simmons lets out a distracted, high-pitched squeak and the conversation’s over.

 

==

 

“Have you really _never_ heard of _the_ Doctor McCoy?” 

Simmons says the words like she’s inches from taking the Lord’s name in vain, and just behind her shoulder, Fitz screws up his face in a scowl. They’re crowded into the kitchen area, Grant slathering mustard on rye while the three of them split an obscenely oversized bucket of trail mix. He reaches for the bowl, and Simmons slides it out of his way. 

“You can’t be serious,” he says.

Simmons tosses her hair over her shoulder while Fitz rolls his eyes. “Woe betide the person who’s unfamiliar with the great Doctor McCoy,” he puts in, his tone three degrees too sharp to qualify as gentle mocking. “You must read the Doctor’s full bibliography. You must walk in the Doctor’s footsteps through the snow at Northwestern University. You must have the Doctor sign your bloody camisole after a guest lecture, because—”

“You know I’d left my copy of _Developing Genetics_ in my dormitory!” Simmons interrupts. Fitz’s hand snakes toward her trail mix bucket, and she slaps him hard enough that Skye grits her teeth. “And in case you’ve forgotten, I never _once_ mocked you as you chased Tom Baker around with your homemade scarf and that ridiculous hat!”

Fitz sputters. “Ridic— I’m sorry, which of us bought a handcrafted replica on eBay and which of us stalked a professor through the snow and a sub-zero windchill with a dog-eared textbook just because she can’t—”

“Uh, okay, _whoa_ ,” Skye cuts in. She spreads out her hands like a peacekeeper and then, when Grant drops his knife in the sink, steals half his sandwich. She ignores his glare and helps herself to an enormous bite. “I get it. Simmons has a major girl-boner for this doctor person, whatever.” She sucks mustard off her thumb while Simmons rolls her eyes and, apparently, ignores the flush of pink that’s crawling across her cheekbones. “What I don’t get is why Coulson’d send us to the middle of nowhere when S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ is probably bursting at the seams with genetics experts.” 

“You know Peoria is a real place, right?” Grant asks. Skye crinkles her nose at him. “Actual people live there.”

“And anyway, Doctor McCoy isn’t any ordinary geneticist,” Simmons offers. She helps herself to a handful of the trail mix and then slides the bucket over to Fitz. “McCoy is the singular expert in the field. Literally no one else in the world even comes close to comparing.”

“She’s not lying,” Fitz chimes in, nodding as he picks around the raisins and almonds in the bowl. He offers it to Grant, but Grant shakes his head. “Doctor McCoy taught at Northwestern for, what, three years?”

“Four,” Simmons replies.

“Four years.” He shrugs. “Published hundreds of articles and three or four textbooks. Some say that it’s McCoy’s team who first verified the existence of extraordinary people, years before they started crawling out of the woodwork.” He tosses a Cheez-It into his mouth and crunches down. “It’s actually fairly fascinating.”

“Some people theorize the doctor might have powers,” Simmons picks up with a wave of her hand. “I mean, I certainly think it’s ridiculous—”

“More ridiculous than Chitauri viruses nearly killing you?” Skye mutters under her breath.

“—but stranger things have definitely happened. And you _must_ wonder, when you’re staring down at someone so brilliant who’s spent their entire life developing such a definitive specialty in a limited field, if there’s rhyme or reason for it.” She rests her elbows on the counter and leans in close. “But personally? I think that Doctor McCoy just has a compulsive need to better the world through the mastery of human genetics.”

Next to her, Fitz rolls his eyes with enough force that Grant thinks he might vomit from the sheer effort of it. Skye, on the other hand, finishes off her half of the sandwich and reaches for the trail mix bucket. “But if the doctor’s such a walking scientific wet dream, why _Peoria_?” she asks. Grant sighs, ready to protest, and she holds up a finger. “Not,” she continues, “because I mind the existence of a city that has literally _no_ utility other than serving as a glorified I-74 rest stop, but I’d think the doctor’d want to be somewhere high-profile. Or at least, back at Northwestern.”

Fitz-Simmons immediately glance at one another, Simmons with her lip caught between her teeth and Fitz with a tiny frown, and Grant swallows a bite of his sandwich without tasting it. “Please don’t tell me we’re about to meet a geneticist version of the Unabomber,” he says.

“No!” Simmons immediately squeaks. Skye frowns at her, but Grant just raises his eyebrows. The scientist attempts to avoid their stares by glancing over at Fitz, but he’s busy building a Lincoln Log cabin out of pretzel sticks. She sighs. “For years, Doctor McCoy worked with S.H.I.E.L.D.,” she explains after a few seconds. “Not as an active agent, but as a guest-lecturer at the Academy and a consultant. With so many people with so many different abilities appearing—more every day, really, and that’s not counting people like Tony Stark—”

“Totally normal people who just happen to be bloody brilliant _and_ handsome,” Fitz breaks in before either Grant or Skye can ask.

“—they needed the foremost expert to help, well, sort out the mess.” Simmons shakes her head. “But about three years ago, shortly before Thor landed in New Mexico—”

“After,” Fitz supplies. Simmons twists to glare at him, and he shrugs. “She says shortly before, I say shortly after. It’s not like there’s a dated letter of resignation out there for us, now is there?”

She sighs. “Around the time Thor landed in New Mexico,” she amends, “Doctor McCoy left Northwestern and S.H.I.E.L.D., cancelled all upcoming speaking engagements and guest lectures, and disappeared off the face of the Earth.” She drops her arms onto the counter. “We all heard rumor that the doctor might start up a facility somewhere in Illinois—maybe a training ground for people with abilities, a place to help them—but nobody ever confirmed it.”

Beside her, Fitz nods. “But the doctor always told stories about the sprawling McCoy family homestead outside Peoria,” he adds. “Putting the two together, it seemed sort of—”

“Obvious?” Skye suggests.

“Inevitable,” Simmons corrects her. She drags in a deep breath, almost as though she’s preparing to heave a long, dreamy sigh, and then pauses. Grant watches as a slight flush climbs across her cheekbones. “I might have it here.”

He frowns. “Have what?”

“My first-edition copy of _Developing Genetics_ with Doctor McCoy’s original foreword. Oh, it’s the most _beautiful_ analysis of the evolution of man!” She releases a rush of breath and then, without warning, grabs Fitz by the sleeve of his cardigan. He inhales a shard of Cheez-It and starts pounding his chest as he hacks. “Come along, Fitz! I need your help!”

“But—” he protests helplessly, and Grant at least shoves the bucket of trail mix at him before he’s dragged out of the kitchen and toward the lab. When he glances over at Skye, it’s to watch her sneak the last of his provolone off his sandwich. “You owe me a new lunch,” he informs her.

“Maybe Simmons’ll buy us all dinner after the doctor signs her bra strap,” she retorts before sauntering away.

 

==

 

They leave the Bus at an airfield and bundle into the SUV together, Coulson and May in the front seats while Grant shares the back with the other three agents. The long highway drive past questionably-named landmarks reminds him of family roadtrips in his parents’ Ford station wagon until May veers off the pavement and onto bumpy dirt back roads. Fitz complains about nausea, the girls squeal, and Grant stares out the window, wondering how exactly a mission about mad scientists landed him on a rural access road in Illinois.

They’re at least ninety minutes from the Bus and twenty or thirty minutes from the last sign of civilization when a geometric splotch breaks the endless horizon, and it’s another two minutes before Grant recognizes that splotch to be a farmhouse and its outbuildings. The house itself is in good repair, with fresh white paint and dark green shutters, but the barn behind it is a rickety collection of rotting siding and shingles. May parks the SUV in the driveway behind a relatively new pickup and slides out with her usual grace, Coulson right behind her. The rest of them pile out like children anxious to find a bathroom or a McDonalds, and Grant only realizes that his knees hurt when he stretches them.

“May, Ward, and I will be first contact,” Coulson instructs once they’ve each reacquainted themselves with solid ground. He’s wearing his normal suit and sunglasses, his holstered sidearm barely visible under his jacket, but something in his stance sets Grant’s teeth on edge. May draws up next to him, languid and unfazed, but he watches as her eyes listlessly sweep across the endless stretch of empty fields. “The rest of you will hold back and wait until we’re sure McCoy’s willing to talk.”

Simmons stops in the middle of hoisting a third computer bag over her shoulders and jerks her attention immediately to Coulson. “But sir—”

“No buts,” Coulson warns sharply. Simmons snaps her mouth shut, Fitz and Skye clumping protectively around her. “Wait by the car, or you’ll spend the rest of the mission _in_ the car.” He waits just long enough for her to nod, then starts down the walk toward the house. Spring flowers, crocuses and daffodils mostly, peek out of the mulch in the flowerbeds. It’s so intensely, aggressively normal that Grant finds himself counting seconds in his head, measuring exactly how quickly he could pull out his gun.

On the porch, Coulson pauses to remove his sunglasses. “Please let me do the talking,” he says, but his tone leaves no room for argument. May nods at him, then steps down from the porch to stand on the middle step. There are three feet between her back and Grant, and another three feet between he and Coulson.

He swears he holds his breath for the full duration of the cheery doorbell tune. His whole body draws up tight when Coulson rings it a second time.

And then, the door jerks open to—

“Oh, go _right_ to hell,” a woman announces, and pulls back to slam the door. For a split second, all Grant registers is the fragmented fact of her existence: tall, broader-than-average build, dark wavy hair, glasses. Then, Coulson steps in front of him and blocks the woman from his sight—mostly to shove his foot in the door.

“Move,” the woman grinds out.

“No.” The door shudders when she shoves it against Coulson’s foot, but Coulson barely blinks. The half of his expression Grant can see is soft, almost uncertain. It reminds him of cases with more vulnerable targets, like the woman from Utah. “Lin, we need—”

“I said no, Phil,” she spits back. The door pulls back far enough that Grant’s able to glimpse the fire in her eyes, and he immediately steps forward. The woman stills, her fingers curling around the edge of the door. Her jaw tightens. “Great, you called in the cavalry.”

“I hate that name,” May says over Grant’s shoulder, and he barely contains his flinch of surprise.

“Wait, you called in the _actual_ cavalry?” the woman amends. She releases the door to throw up her hands. “I knew I should have stayed in bed today.”

She turns on her heel and immediately stomps into the house, leaving the door standing open. Coulson hesitates less than a full beat before following, May only two steps behind him. Grant glances back at the others—they’re huddled around the side of the SUV, staring—and shrugs before trailing after Coulson and May.

He steps into the blandest hallway and front room he’s ever encountered.

On the drive over, he’d expected the home of Simmons’s mysterious Doctor McCoy to reek of chemicals and experiments, a half-home, half-lab of his own creation. Grant’s served on strike teams and covert operations requiring the infiltration of dozens of secret science facilities and laboratories; he knows the madly brilliant scientist types when he meets them. Instead, the living room looks like it belongs out of a 1950s issue of _Better Homes and Gardens_ , all polished woodwork and neatly-ordered tchotchkes. The damask wallpaper is subtle but tasteful, the couch features matching throw pillows, and the television—new and sleek, but not overly large—balances on a beautiful old wooden table that’s topped with a lace doily. 

He glances at May, who shrugs. She positions herself near the front window, nearly blending in with the embroidered drapes.

The woman crosses her arms before Grant remembers she’s there, and for a moment, he’s struck by how _ordinary_ she is. She wears jeans and a striped sweater, plus heavy work boots caked with weeks-old mud, and her hair is less wavy than it is messy. She peers at Coulson through thick, slightly-crooked glasses. Grant wonders for a moment whether she lives in the home or is just the help.

Coulson, for his part, straightens one of the half-dozen photographs on display on the old upright piano just inside the doorway. “We need to talk,” he says simply.

“We have nothing to talk about,” the woman returns smoothly.

Coulson shakes his head. “I disagree.” He moves unobtrusively through the room, touching knick-knacks and adjusting the throw on the back of an armchair. The woman watches carefully, her jaw tight and steely expression unflinching. “We have a situation.”

She snorts. “You always have a situation.”

“This is an especially bad one. Innocent people are being killed.” Something soft flickers across the woman’s expression, but only for the briefest moment. She rolls her lips together, and Coulson raises his eyebrows. “Then you’ve heard?”

“ _I_ haven’t, no,” she replies, fingers tightening against her arms. She pauses, then shakes her head exactly once. “But that doesn’t matter. It’s going to take more than your scary-looking field agents to—”

“I don’t think you understand,” Grant hears himself say, his voice sharp and low. Coulson stops toying with a rumpled copy of _TV Guide_ to glance up at him. He steps out of the doorway and fully into the room, his footfalls heavy on the hardwood floor. “People with abilities are being murdered. That’s why we need to talk Doctor McCoy. Urgently.”

The woman releases a little, half-amused huff of breath and casts Coulson a withering look. Coulson straightens to his full height and meets her gaze. “Your brand new duckling has no idea, does he?” she asks.

He shrugs. “I didn’t really have the chance to tell him.”

Grant frowns. When he glances at May, she simply shakes her head. “Tell me what?”

Coulson opens his mouth like he might respond, but the woman steps in immediately. She sweeps her messy hair behind her shoulders and then offers Grant a hand. When he stares at it for a beat too long, she flashes him a sharp, unfriendly smile. “Doctor Katalin McCoy at your service.”

They stare at each other for a few long seconds before the doctor curls her fingers and drops her arm to the side. She shakes her head, her messy waves of hair bobbing, and Grant only finds his voice long enough to blurt, “You’re Doctor McCoy?” When she laughs, it’s a sharp, bitter sound. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but I thought— After everything Simmons said, just I assumed—”

“You’ve roped Jemma Simmons into your little descent into madness?” McCoy interrupts. She dismisses Grant entirely and spins on her heel to glare at Coulson. The man hardly breathes. “You are a menace to society, Phil.”

“I’ve been called worse.” McCoy rolls her eyes and starts to stalk toward a doorway at the back of the room—it looks to lead to the kitchen—but then, Coulson murmurs, “Lin.” There’s an unusual quality to his voice, one he saves for when he talks about his mysterious cellist or his beloved Captain America trading cards, and the doctor freezes in the threshold, her palm pressed to the jamb. “They’re telling people there’s a cure.”

McCoy’s fingers stretch, then curl against the woodwork. “There’s no cure,” she says quietly.

“Simmons thinks—”

“Phil, there’s _no_ cure.” She twists around, her hair flying and body tense. Grant feels himself flinch back into attentiveness, his hand lifting from his side to reach for a weapon, but neither Coulson nor May bat so much as an eyelash. May turns her back to the room, staring out the window at the manicured front lawn. “Don’t you think if there was, I would’ve found it by now? Because if you think I’d even _think_ of giving up when there’s some way to help him, I—”

“No one’s saying that,” Coulson says, tone perfectly even. He raises a hand, and McCoy’s shoulders soften. She leans a shoulder against the doorjamb, the fight deflating until she’s looser and softer. When she crosses her arms again, she’s nearly hugging herself. “They’re injecting people with some kind of serum,” Coulson continues after a few beats of heavy silence. “Simmons thinks that, with the right amount of manipulation, it could help offset some of the problems we’ve seen in people with abilities. Behave as a—”

“Disease modifying treatment,” McCoy finishes.

He nods. “At least on a temporary basis, yes. I know what you’ve been working on isn’t exactly formulated for broad dispersal, right now,” he presses, and she snorts as she shakes her head. “But if we combine your expertise and work here with their formula and add Simmons to the mix . . . ”

He trails off, the thread of the conversation dangling between them. McCoy glances over her shoulder and through the other room. When Grant shifts a few feet to the left, he’s able to see through the doorway into the kitchen—and then, through the sliding glass door. The rickety barn looms unreally large and casts a long shadow on the backyard. McCoy stares at it for a long time before she says, “He won’t like it.”

“He doesn’t have to like it,” Coulson pushes. She glances back at him, eyebrows raised, and he shrugs. “You need to like it enough to convince him.”

“There’s not much convincing him, these days.”

“Not from other people, maybe,” Coulson replies. “I’m sure it’s a different story when it comes from you.”

For the first time since their arrival, McCoy’s mouth lifts into a tiny smile. It illuminates the lines around her eyes, and Grant realizes for the first time that she’s older than he first thought. Or, if not older, she’s seen a lot more life than he’d first assumed. She also drags fingers through her hair. “Send the ducklings into the barn,” she finally says. Every word stretches like a sigh. “There’s leftovers in the fridge if you’re hungry. And I assume you still know where to put your guns.” Coulson nods, and the doctor narrows her eyes. “ _All_ the guns.”

“Every last one,” Coulson promises, and only after he raises his hands in a defenseless shrug does McCoy finally nod and stalk out the back door. 

Grant’s still standing in the middle of the living room, watching the doctor’s back disappear into the shadow from the barn, when he realizes that Coulson and May are both staring at him with twin smirks. “Should I ask what just happened?” 

May walks up and pats him on the shoulder. “Welcome to the McCoy residence,” she says cryptically, and then heads for the front door.

 

==

 

“This is not a barn,” Grant observes ten minutes later, and Doctor McCoy laughs as she drops onto a wheeled stool and slides up to a massive computer console.

From the outside, the barn behind McCoy’s pristine white farmhouse is an eyesore, a rotting mound of barely-organized planks and beams that manage somehow to stand upright. Just by opening the huge double doors, Grant’d worried he was taking his life in his own hands. 

Then, he’d realized that the rickety exterior only served as a shell to hide McCoy’s private laboratory.

The inside of the barn is about ten times larger than Fitz-Simmons’s shared space on the Bus, a massive room that’s covered from one wall to another in equipment that Grant’s never even seen before. Computer consoles litter the room, their cords stretching out toward a vast array of whirring, buzzing machines; Simmons flits from one to another, babbling jargon so quickly that she’s nearly speaking an entirely different language. She pulls Fitz after her, shoving him at various contraptions only to drag him away again. They switch on and off a holographic manipulation table that’s twice the size of the one in the Bus, inspect a wide variety of test tubes, and—

“Don’t mess with the fridge,” McCoy warns without glancing away from her console.

Grant resists the urge to drag a hand over his face. May’s already scaled the ladder in the far corner of the room and stationed herself on what appears to be part hay-loft, part apartment, her shoulder leaning against a reinforced steel girder. They nod to one another, but then she resumes her constant vigil over the space.

Skye, on the other hand, hovers just a few feet behind McCoy’s shoulder, her eyes saucer-wide and glimmering with the glee of a kid on Christmas morning. “Okay, this is totally not S.H.I.E.L.D. approved language or whatever, but how the _fuck_ did you land some of this equipment?” She leans forward to peer at some sort of tiny, blinking box. “I mean, you have signal-jammers that could interfere with the whole county if you wanted them to, never mind the number of—”

“Spectrometers and chromatographs,” Fitz tosses out as Simmons drags him to the far end of the barn.

Skye waves a hand. “Yeah, those things.” McCoy’s mouth kicks up into a smile, but she never glances away from the computer screens. There’s six of them, arranged in a unit like a security guard’s CCTV station, but every display is a different high-definition, real-time reading of— Something. Grant squints at one of the graphs, an attempt to read the values, and realizes after the fact that both axes are actually equations. Skye, meanwhile, ignores the graphs to focus on— 

“Is that, like, a heart monitor?”

Grant follows her gaze to a seventh display, one that’s hanging on a separate mount just to the left of the desk. It’s reminiscent of the monitors you see in hospitals; on it, he recognizes values for blood pressure, pulse rate, blood oxygenation, and respiration. Under those numbers are a dozen others, twisting graphs that he’s never seen before.

McCoy pushes her stool back to stare at the display for a few seconds. Her expression softens away from its usual impassivity for a beat before she shakes her head. “I like to think of it as a biometric monitor, but yes.”

“Does it monitor you?” Skye presses.

“No,” the doctor replies. A few keystrokes later, and the entire console aside from the biometric monitor locks down. Only a single cursor, blinking perpetually white on the top-left screen, suggests the computers are even turned on. She stands and starts to step away, then pauses. “Don’t touch,” she warns Skye.

Skye blinks. “Why would I—”

“Don’t,” McCoy repeats, walking off.

Skye huffs and tosses her head, her eyes rolling as she goes, and she stalks across the barn to where Simmons is finally unpacking their mounds of equipment. Near the entrance, Coulson finishes locking away their firearms in a gun safe, then hands the key to McCoy. They stand there for a moment, separated by eighteen inches of space and intense eye contact. When Coulson says something, the doctor’s shoulders tighten almost imperceptibly; her booted footfalls are heavy against the tiled floor as she heads back toward the empty tables where the rest of the team is unpacking.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” she instructs, and Fitz-Simmons snap immediately to awed attention. Grant crosses his arms and watches from a safe distance. “I need to head into the basement for a little while. When I come back, I need all the information you’ve developed on the formula these nutjobs—”

“Normalizers,” Fitz offers.

McCoy pauses to stare at him. He drops his eyes to the table and starts fiddling with the strap on one of Simmons’s bags. “I need all the information you’ve developed, as well as the profiles of the people they injected with their serum.”

Fitz-Simmons glances at one another, and Fitz wets his lips. “We, ah, only really have data on two of the victims,” he says carefully. McCoy blinks at him, and he picks at the strap again. “In most cases, the explosion managed to, uhm—”

“There haven’t been a lot of leftover pieces for us to work with,” May supplies, and Fitz, Simmons, and Skye all jump at the sound of her voice. She rolls her eyes quickly before resting her hands on her hips. Grant’s not entirely sure how she climbed down from the loft so quickly. “I assume you’ll want someone to go down with you?” she asks.

McCoy presses her lips into a tight line. At the table, the three younger agents—if you can count Skye as an agent—exchange uncertain glances. Coulson joins the group but stands at the far fringes, his arms relaxed at his side. Grant tries to imagine the threads connecting them, but he’s left only with fragments of information: Coulson’s use of what he assumes is the doctor’s nickname, McCoy calling him a “menace to society,” May’s comment about the basement and strange ease in the living room. He pictures the three of them on a field team together or huddled in a training seminar, but nothing really rings true.

Finally, though, McCoy shakes her head. “You’ll make him nervous,” she decides. She glances briefly to Coulson, who nods. “And if you don’t have more data on the victims, I’ll need a fresh blood draw for some preliminary testing. Doctor Simmons?”

Simmons’s whole body flinches at the sound of her name. Behind her back, Skye mouths _doctor?_ and Fitz shrugs in response. “Me?” Simmons blurts. She glances around the barn like she’s checking for another Doctor Simmons before gesturing to her chest. “You want— Oh, Doctor McCoy, I would be _honored_ to—”

“Good. Grab a lab coat, and let’s go.” Simmons practically trips over herself in her rush to dig into one of her other bags. Grant rolls his eyes and glances away, only to discover that McCoy’s eyes are sweeping over the rest of them. Fitz and Skye both fidget under her piercing gaze. When she glances at Grant, he raises his chin.

She never once blinks.

“Behave yourselves,” she instructs. When she steps away from the group, Coulson follows calmly behind her. By the time Simmons catches up, McCoy’s keying into a door that’s set into the far wall using a complicated numerical passcode. Something hisses, and when the door slides away, it reveals nothing more than a brightly-lit stairwell.

Grant watches as they disappear down the steps, and then, as the door slams shut behind them.

It’s after three seconds of very heavy silence that Skye asks, “Okay, was that _actually_ , like, bad sci-fi movie creepy, or did I just imagine it?”

“You imagined it,” Grant and May say in unison. When he follows the sound of her voice, he discovers her back in the loft, her elbows resting on the railing and her eyes trained not on any of them, but on the heavy, closed door.

 

==

 

“You want to tell me what that was all about?” Grant asks Coulson later that night.

They’re back in the too-pristine living room, surrounded by various ceramic creatures that gleam in the evening lamp light. Fitz-Simmons and May are still in the barn with McCoy, the former two helping the doctor while the latter maintains her constant vigil over them, but Skye’s camped out in one of the upstairs bedrooms with a laptop, researching the Normalizers. Grant thinks it’s a dead-end—in his experience, the louder a group like this is, the better they are at covering their tracks—but McCoy’d stared them both down until Skye’d run off to grab her computer. 

Outside, the dark of the rural Illinois night stretches out like an endless abyss, but inside, the farmhouse is bright and warm. Antique lamps cast warm yellow-white light off the pale wallpaper and the well-shined wood almost glows. Coulson, still in his suit, sits on the couch and flips through a recent copy of _Newsweek_ , but Grant can’t quite sit still. He studies the paintings on the walls, the dozens of glass animals lining the shelves, and then heads toward the piano.

Coulson flips a page in his magazine. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you know what I’m talking about,” Grant retorts, and the man glances up for the express purpose of raising his eyebrows. Grant rolls his eyes. “The basement? May inviting herself along? A blood draw?” Coulson carefully closes the magazine and lays it back on the coffee table. “I’m Level 7. You can’t hide security risks from me like you can Fitz and the others. I need to—”

Coulson nods toward the piano. “Second picture on your right,” he says simply. 

Grant sighs and turns back around. The piano’s nestled against one of the walls, backed so far into the corner that it functions more as furniture than as a working musical instrument. A number of framed photographs line the top. There’s one of a large family that spans at least three generations, one of a brown-haired boy on a tire swing outside a school, one of a younger Katalin McCoy graduating some level of post-secondary education. Grant sighs, ready to complain that Coulson’s wasting his time, when he notices the second-to-last picture.

One featuring a young, carefree Katalin McCoy laughing in a wedding dress. She stands beside a tall, broad, brown-haired man in a tux. He laughs, too, and when Grant pushes the last picture to the side, he realizes that their fingers are intertwined.

“They met in high school—or so the story goes,” Coulson says quietly, and Grant twists away from the piano to find the other agent standing at his shoulder. Their eyes meet briefly, Coulson offering a small, sad smile before he nods back to the photo. “They were both brilliant, fearless minds, if a little socially-awkward. It was love at first argument over their AP Chemistry homework.”

“What happened to them?” Grant asks.

Coulson smiles again, his face tight, and walks back toward the couch. He pauses, almost as though he intends to sit down, then moves toward the window. “The usual love story, for the most part. They went to college together, got married, started graduate school. She finished her PhD in genetics, he started his residency at an Evanston hospital. They planned on living happily ever after.”

Grant glances at the photograph again. McCoy is young and vibrant, her whole face soft with laughter instead of tight with fear and anger. When he finally turns away, he finds Coulson watching him. “He has powers, doesn’t he?”

The other man nods slowly. “We at S.H.I.E.L.D. suspected long before Thor or the Hulk that ordinary people—friends, neighbors, strangers in the grocery store—might have extraordinary abilities. For years, we investigated every strange fire, explosion, or flood that popped up in hopes of finding some kind of proof. Some kind of, I don’t know, alteration in our human gene pool that’d prove us right. We never thought it’d start in someone’s brain.”

He shakes his head and steps away from the window. “Katalin’s bright, but Henry— He makes Tony Stark look like a high-school dropout. He once wrote a critique of one of Doctor Banner’s papers that you’d think was written by a seasoned nuclear physicist—and not a man who read up on the topic over a long weekend.” He flashes Grant an almost rueful smile. When he rounds the couch, it’s to lean his arms against the back and shrug. “Over the years, his capacity to learn, to _retain_ , increased ten- and twenty-fold. He and Lin worked together, studying the ways his brain developed. She came onto a few research teams as a consultant, worked closely with our agency, and then—”

“He broke,” a woman’s voice interrupts quietly, and Grant spins on his heel to find McCoy standing in the doorway. She’s wearing a lab coat over her clothes, her glasses pushed up on the top of her head. Dark circles threaten to wholly overtake her eyes. She shucks the lab coat, draping it over the back of an armchair, and crosses to the piano. “The human body isn’t hard-wired to support a mind that’s on overdrive,” she explains. She readjusts the photographs until the wedding picture half-obscures a few others. “He stopped sleeping. He’d only eat if I sat him down and put the food in front of him. He started obsessing, pushing himself and his mind to the limits. It was—” She squares her shoulders before turning back to Grant and Coulson. “He suffered a psychotic break,” she says, “and I needed to act.”

“Act how?” Grant asks. Coulson glances down at his folded hands, averting Grant’s gaze, and Grant shakes his head. “Sir, I’m sorry, but since the minute you mentioned Doctor McCoy—” He pauses, frowning. “You were talking about _this_ Doctor McCoy, right?”

The doctor’s mouth purses into a tight smile as Grant jerks his head in her direction. “Henry’s a pediatric surgeon.”

“Okay. Then ever since you mentioned Doctor McCoy, this mission’s consisted entirely of cloak-and-dagger half-truths. Barns that aren’t barns, doctors that don’t look like doctors—no offense,” he adds, and McCoy shrugs. “And that’s not mentioning the basements with blood tests and the state-of-the-art equipment lining that bunker in there.”

He gestures toward the back door, and Coulson glances at McCoy. “Our hacker probably explained what all the bells and whistles do,” he offers. The doctor nods in understanding.

Grant, however, throws up his hands. “Sir, I can respect if this is a safety protocol or outside my clearance level, but the fact you’re hell-bent on keeping me and the rest of the team in the dark is—”

“Henry McCoy lives in the basement under the barn.” May’s voice is smooth and low when she steps out of the shadowed kitchen and into the living room’s glow, her hands resting comfortably on her hips. Coulson shifts to stand, his palms pressed to the back of the couch; McCoy glances back at the photographs atop the piano, her face quiet and blank. “You want the truth? That’s it. The cloak and dagger act is because there’s a madman in the basement.”

McCoy’s head immediately snaps back toward the doorway. Fire ignites her tired eyes. “He’s not a _madman_ ,” she retorts coldly. “He can’t control it. And before I finished the formula—”

“He nearly killed two agents before you calmed him down,” May interrupts, and McCoy’s jaw snaps shut. She rolls her lips together, but her entire body is still wound as tightly as a newly-coiled spring. May sighs, her shoulders slowly slackening. “I understand why it happened, why you didn’t want to see him in a S.H.I.E.L.D. prison for the rest of his life,” she says after a few long seconds. “But that doesn’t change the fact that he’s insane.”

McCoy crosses her arms tightly over her chest, her body nearly folding in on itself. Her jaw moves a few times, opening and shifting before setting again, and Grant expects some sort of explanation. Instead, it’s Coulson who quietly says, “He’s a good man.” May glances at him, her face stony, and he raises his hands. “What happened when we brought him in—trying to help him control his mind—”

“Like the Army helped the Hulk,” McCoy mutters.

“—was a tragic accident. It’s also why we needed you specifically, Lin.” He steps away from the couch and tucks his hands in his pockets. “Doctor McCoy developed a formula that’s specifically coded to her husband’s immune system,” he explains. The doctor nods, her fingers still tightly gripping her arms. “It reduces the activity in his brain, helps control his outbursts. It regulates him in a way we _can’t_ regulate other people who are this far gone in their abilities. If the Normalizers are really onto something with their serum and we combine the formulas, then—”

“It won’t be a cure,” McCoy agrees. Her eyes sweep the room, from Coulson to May and, finally, to Grant. “But it could help other people.”

“And Henry,” May adds.

McCoy smiles humorlessly. “My madman in the basement.” She steps around May, grabbing her lab coat on the way, and disappears back through the kitchen. The white coat shines like a beacon in the darkness, and Grant watches her back retreat through and then disappear into the backyard. 

May presses her lips into a tight line for a moment as silence overtakes them. “Henry McCoy might have been a good man,” she says after several heavy beats. “But the person living in that basement stopped being Henry McCoy a long time ago.”

 

==

 

Grant wakes up the next morning to the smell of coffee and bacon, and he rolls off the pristine guest bedroom to wander downstairs in his socks, jeans, and undershirt. He vaguely remembers climbing up the stairs just after midnight and collapsing for what he thought’d be only an hour or two, but outside, the spring sun shines on tiny birds in the bushes.

Skye’s perched on a chair at the kitchen table, her hair wild and unwashed as she peers at something on a S.H.I.E.L.D.-issue tablet. She pushes an almost-overflowing cup of coffee toward him without looking up. “Lin made bacon, and there’s, like, an apocalypse’s worth of Eggos in the freezer if you’re into frozen waffles.”

She punctuates the comments by snapping off the crispy end of a slice of thick-cut bacon. Grant starts to lift the coffee cup to his mouth, then pauses. “You’re on a first-name basis, now?”

“Uh, yeah?” she retorts. She lays the tablet down to rest her elbows on the table. “Look, I know you probably think that this whole mission is B-A-N-A-N-A-S—” 

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“—but Lin’s crazy-brilliant and might actually solve this whole ‘creating a serum to make people explode into less-than-bite-sized chunks’ mess.” She shrugs and picks the tablet back up. “You should give her the benefit of the doubt.”

“I think I met my benefit-of-the-doubt quota with you,” he replies, and helps himself to a slice of bacon before wandering out into the backyard with the tiny, singing birds. 

The barn is bright in the morning, sun shining in first through the skewed wooden siding and then through slim, high-set windows, and the whole laboratory smells of bacon and coffee. Fitz-Simmons are bent over a table full of chemistry equipment, muttering to one another at break-neck speeds and occasionally groping through the collection of beakers and flasks to find their coffee cups. Empty plates with the remnants of syrup and bacon are balanced on the table’s corner. When Grant glances up, May nods at him from the loft area and sips her own coffee.

He rubs his face. “Did any of you actually sleep?” he asks.

Fitz-Simmons nearly bash their heads together as they jerk up to look at him, Fitz muttering as he splashes coffee on the side of his hand. “We took turns sleeping on the cot in the loft,” Simmons supplies. “It’s actually quite comfortable. There’s a microfiber blanket, and the pillow was a bit like sleeping on a cloud.” She sighs dreamily while Fitz rolls his eyes. “But Doctor McCoy wanted at least one of us up at all times, monitoring our first round of testing to track how the _other_ Doctor McCoy’s blood reacts to the modified formula on a molecular level, and—”

“English,” Grant says for the hundredth time in the last day and a half.

Simmons deflates like a popped balloon, but Fitz forces a little smile. “We spent all night trying to see if our first version of the formula worked,” he explains.

“And?”

“It didn’t.”

“Not _yet_ ,” Simmons presses immediately. Her voice is high and chirpy, but Grant catches the momentary flash of worry that settles around her eyes. “Part of the problem is that the Normalizer’s formula is meant to interact with anyone’s genetic code—yours, mine, anyone else with or without powers—but Doctor McCoy’s formula only works with the _other_ Doctor McCoy’s DNA. Generalizing the functional formula and then combining its properties with the Normalizer’s serum—”

“The Boom-Boom Serum,” Fitz clarifies.

Simmons glares at him. “We are _not_ calling that crime against nature the Boom-Boom Serum!” she announces with the seasoned exasperation of a day-old argument. When Grant raises his eyebrows at her, she smoothes her hands over her lab coat and releases a long breath. “We need more time to combine the formulas in a way that will work for more than a specific immune system.”

“Which would be easier if the one functional formula in the world hadn’t been coded to one specific person’s DNA for its half-dozen years of development.” Fitz waves his hand at a tablet that’s balanced on the edge of the table. “Doctor McCoy has years of notes and data, but it all relates only to her husband and not to the rest of the population.” He shakes his head. “It’s been a bloody mess, sorting out what’s relevant to everyone else and what’s only relevant to the doctor.”

“The other doctor,” Simmons puts in. “Who is really quite lovely if you overlook the fact that daily injections help keep him quite lovely.” She ducks her head back to the tablet. “If only we’d had better luck at removing from _his_ formula the bits and pieces that react specifically to his ability . . . ”

Her voice trails off, the words retreating into half-hearted mumblings as she starts paging through the data on the tablet. Fitz starts to bend close to her, squinting at the information along with his colleague, before Grant thinks to ask, “Where’s Doctor McCoy?”

“She went down to bring breakfast to the other Doctor McCoy,” he says. “He’s actually not as insane as you’d think for a man who lives concealed in a basement for the safety of everyone around him,” he defends. When Grant raises his eyebrows at him, he flinches back a half-inch. “I mean, he’s perfectly pleasant to talk to as long as he’s—”

“Sane?” Grant offers.

“Medicated,” a voice replies, and Grant glances down at the tabletop as Katalin McCoy appears at his side. She moves around him, setting a full mug of delicious-smelling coffee down on the edge of the table before she rests her hands on her hips. “Though I appreciate your twisted candor.”

“I only meant—”

“I’m sure.” The clipped, harsh edge to her tone forces Grant to snap his jaw shut, and for a moment, they stare at one another. McCoy’s clearly both slept and showered in the last six hours, her eyes bright and sharp behind her glasses and her messy hair still half-damp. She glances over at Fitz-Simmons. “Hank had a couple ideas for us to play around with, if you’re done gossiping.”

Grant frowns. “I thought you said he’s a pediatric surgeon.”

She smiles humorlessly at him. “Surprisingly, it’s easy to become an expert in something that might eventually kill you,” she replies. They stare at each other for a moment, Grant’s lips pursed, before she shakes her head. “Enjoy your coffee, agent.”

She gestures dismissively to the cup on the edge of the table, and it’s only after she joins the other scientists that he realizes she’d brought the newly-filled mug for him. He mutters his thanks and walks away with it, the heat of the ceramic radiating across his palm and up his arm. He considers sticking around the barn like May, an extra pair of eyes to supervise the science, but then he catches a glimpse of the computer console from the day before. The six screens are locked and black, but the seventh, the one set apart from the desk, shows the same vitals as before. He stares at the steady heartbeat and respiration briefly before he realizes that the biometrics belong to McCoy’s husband.

He takes his coffee and leaves the barn, instead.

The spring day is warm and sunny, but the breeze is brisk against his bare arms. He stands in the grass halfway between the barn and the house, staring out across barren fields. He imagines the dark earth tilled and ready for seed, or wind-swept corn as far as the eye can see—and then, he imagines McCoy’s mad husband like a werewolf, stalking through the darkness and screaming at the moon. They’re miles from civilization not because of coincidence, but because of necessity. 

“He’s really not as dangerous as you think,” Coulson’s voice says somewhere behind him, and he twists to watch the other man step out of the shadow of the barn and into the sunlight. Aside from his slightly-loosened tie, he’s as pristine as always, not a thread or hair out of place. Grant wonders whether he’s slept, or if he, like May, runs on nothing more than adrenaline and caffeine. “I know what you’re thinking,” he presses, and Grant sips his coffee. “You’re thinking I brought my team here, into this modern-day Bronte novel full of hidden dangers and tragic heroines, and that you’re going to need to defend Fitz-Simmons and Skye against the madman in the basement.” He shrugs. “But he’s not like that.”

Grant snorts. “May said he almost killed two agents.”

“Because May doesn’t know the whole story,” Coulson counters. He slides his hands into his pockets and glances out across the stretch of empty land. “You have to understand, Lin knew about Henry’s abilities long before she brought him into S.H.I.E.L.D. I think sometimes she suspected that he’d need our help eventually, but her motives were always pure.” He shakes his head. “By the time she brought him in to us, his grip on reality had started to fray. He hadn’t eaten or slept in days, his behavior was erratic and out-of-control. Lin’d tried to sedate him, and he’d—” He pauses there, his lips pressed into a tight line. For a brief second, Grant considers pushing him, demanding to know more, but the distance in Coulson’s expression promises that he’ll get nothing more than a raised eyebrow in response. 

He sips his coffee until, finally, Coulson wets his lips. “Imagine yourself in his position,” he says quietly, and Grant swallows a mouthful without tasting it. “Your mind is scattered in a thousand directions, your _identity_ crumbling around you, and the person you love and trust the most—the person who’s worked for years trying to protect you from yourself—drags you to a strange facility. Bright lights, strangers with syringes, armored agents.” He releases an uneven breath and, finally, glances over at Grant. “He’s no Hulk, but he played football in high school and college. Combine that with adrenaline and a body that’s running on overdrive trying to protect itself, and—”

“Two agents would hardly make a dent,” Grant supplies.

He nods. “May arrived near the end of the fight, if you want to call it that,” he continues. “All she saw were two unconscious agents, a trashed medical examination room, a clump of terrified medical technicians—and Lin trying to talk Henry down while he threatened her and everyone else in the room with the mangled remains of a chair.” He smiles wryly. “I think the only reason she didn’t lay him out right there was because I wouldn’t let her.”

Grant snorts, shaking his head, but finds after a few seconds that he can’t quite meet Coulson’s eyes. He runs his thumb over the rim of the coffee mug. It’s an old mug, with a chipped bottom and a handle that’s clearly been cracked and glued more than once, and it boasts the name of a college along one side. He wonders whether it’s the McCoy’s alma mater or just somewhere one or both of them visited years ago.

Then, he wonders whether the laughing woman in the wedding photograph knew how much her life would change over the years with her handsome, smiling husband.

“We’ll find the Normalizers even if we don’t find a way to change their serum,” Coulson says after a few seconds, and Grant glances back over at him. “They’ll show too much of their hand or wear themselves down, just like those groups always do, and when they hit that point, we’ll be ready for them.” The ghost of his wry smile drifts away, and he casts his eyes back out across the field. “But there’s a lot more riding on this than just a group of renegades who don’t trust people with abilities.”

Grant twists to look back at the looming, half-broken barn. “He really was a good man, wasn’t he?” he asks quietly.

“He still is,” Coulson replies, and walks away.

 

==

 

They work more-or-less straight through the rest of the day, save for Fitz-Simmons breaking off for individual cat-naps or McCoy retreating to the basement to converse with her husband. Sometime around noon, May leaves the loft and retreats into the house; when she reappears three hours later, she’s wearing a different tank under her S.H.I.E.L.D. jacket but is otherwise unchanged. Coulson drifts between the barn and the house, conversing with the scientists and Skye in hushed tones until the creases on his forehead deepen to trenches. Twice, he steps out into the yard to talk frantically into a cell phone. Whether he’s speaking to HQ or anyone else, though, he never says.

The sky’s shifting from brilliant blue to a dark shade somewhere between blue and purple when McCoy tosses her glasses onto a table, throws up her hands, and announces, “Okay, we’re eating now.” She abandons the chemistry equipment and whirring machines to trek into the house, and within a few minutes, Fitz-Simmons follow. Coulson scans a few charts on the interactive display table before joining them, and by the time Grant finally leaves the barn behind, May and Skye are in the McCoy kitchen. They scour cabinets and, as a group, cobble together a strange, mismatched meal: canned soup, frozen burritos, triscuits with melted cheese, baby carrots with ranch dressing. They spread out around the kitchen and living room, eating in companionable silence, and for the first time since they landed in Peoria—and maybe as far back as during the briefing on the Bus—Grant feels the tension in his shoulders unspool. For a moment, he stops thinking of this as a mission and more of as a teambuilding exercise with an extra, unexpected team member.

But the intensity of the last two days is not without its toll, and as Grant finishes his second bowl of soup, the rest of his team members start to droop and wither like spring flowers in the desert sun. Skye declares she needs to sleep and climbs the stairs up to the second floor of the farmhouse; Simmons follows a few minutes later, her eyelids drooping heavily. May and Coulson end a quiet conversation by announcing that they need to return to the Bus for official S.H.I.E.L.D. business, though Grant suspects they just don’t want to sleep on faded floral-print sheets in a farmhouse guest room. By the time the dishes are piled in the sink and the SUV’s rumbling down the farmhouse driveway, only Fitz and McCoy remain at the kitchen table, each of them scrolling through data on their respective tablets.

“I want to run some of these numbers by Hank,” the doctor says after a few moments. Her hair is frizzy and messy from a day’s work, and she starts to run her fingers through it before she realizes it’s halfway tied back by a rubber band. She tugs the band out and tosses it onto the table. “I’m not sure he’ll have any ideas, but he’s a fresh set of eyes.”

Fitz glances over at her in surprise. “I’m not going to be much use without Jemma,” he says urgently. “She’s bio-chem, I’m engineering, the most I can do is read these numbers and—”

“Then get some rest,” McCoy interrupts. She touches him on the arm, and Fitz immediately settles. Grant wonders how many of these interactions he’s missed as he’s skulked between the barn and farmhouse like an over-protective guard dog. The doctor smiles slightly. “I’m actually going to sleep tonight, too.”

“Where?” Grant asks without thinking. Both Fitz and McCoy glance up at him in surprise, almost as though they’d forgotten he was in the room. He shrugs. “I noticed three bedrooms upstairs, but they’re all the same. Same sheets, same general décor, nothing personal. Not exactly the kind of warm, homey feel I’d expect in a house like this.”

The expression that crosses McCoy’s face straddles the line between bitterness and amusement. “The care and feeding of basement madmen is a full-time job,” she comments, her lips twisting into a quiet smile. She locks the tablet, pushing back her chair as she moves, and starts picking the dishes up off the table. “You might as well sleep with the rest of them. Better than wasting your night staring at the wall, at least.”

She reaches out for Grant’s bowl, ready to pluck it from his hands, but for some reason, he tightens his grip. The doctor stills, staring at him in surprise, and he wets his lips. He’s not entirely sure why he’s frozen there—words, he knows, will come up short—so he just shakes his head. “You need fresh eyes on your data,” he says. “I can at least do the dishes.” When her fingers loosen on the bowl, he pulls it out of her grip—and then, he helps himself to the plates in her other hand. “I slept last night. From the sounds of it, no one else did.”

“Except for an hour here and there,” Fitz points out.

“Except that,” Grant agrees, and he crosses to the sink before McCoy can argue.

He spends a long time washing up, his body rooted to the tile under the sink even after Fitz retreats up the stairs to another of the guest bedrooms. He stares out the window at the looming barn and listens to the sounds of a rural night: the settling house, the whistling wind, the chirping crickets. He dries each of the dishes individually and finds their places in the cabinets; when that’s finished, he runs a cloth over the counters and tabletop, and steps into the living room to fix pillows and straighten knick-knacks.

His eyes glimpse the McCoy wedding picture, and he thinks for a moment he feels the ghost of the McCoys’ shared pasts drift past him. His hair stands on end, a shiver running through him.

He grabs his jacket off one of the chairs and plunges out into the backyard, instead.

He hardly realizes that he’s headed straight into the barn until he’s there, standing in the artificial darkness of the too-large room. In the dead of the night, it’s as still as a tomb, its features lit only by the constant glow of a few select monitors and a few blinking lights. His footfalls reverberate off the metal and into the space around him, then fade swiftly into the suffocating silence. He’s considering climbing into the loft and sleeping on the cot there, provided that McCoy herself hasn’t settled down for the night, when he hears something heavy impact the floor behind him. He stills, his body tensing and his senses sharpening. The silence rushes in around him, a riptide that threatens to drown him.

He recognizes the second impact as a footfall, heavier and steadier than his own, and he reaches for his sidearm as he whirls on his heel. When he remembers that it’s locked in a gun safe in the farm house along with all of May and Coulson’s weapons, he lowers his center of gravity into a defensive position and raises both his hands.

In the darkness, someone chuckles. A third footfall echoes through the room, then a fourth, the sound traveling too quickly for Grant to properly track its origin point. He backs slowly toward one of the tables of chemistry equipment, ready to fashion a beaker into a makeshift weapon if need be, when the barn suddenly erupts in white light. Grant raises an arm to cover his eyes, but it disorients him; when he runs into the nearest table, he almost loses his balance.

Somewhere in the room, the voice chuckles again. “You S.H.I.E.L.D. agents always were the type to spook at shadows,” it comments, and when Grant finally opens his eyes, he finds himself staring at a man.

He’s tall and broadly-set, not heavy as much as _built_ , his body toned from years of dedication and effort. In fact, the longer Grant stares, the longer he realizes that every aspect of the man is broadly exaggerated: the squareness of his jaw, the size and shape of his hands and fingers, the breadth of his not-unfriendly smile. His brown hair is tousled and messy, his clothes—t-shirts and a pair of plaid knit pants that Grant belatedly recognizes as pajamas—simple, and small silver-rimmed glasses perch on his nose. He pushes them up idly, somehow emphasizing both frown and laugh lines, and then drops his hands to his sides.

Realization sweeps over Grant so quickly, he nearly loses his balance a second time. His fingers curl around the lip of the table for support. “You’re Henry McCoy.”

McCoy’s smile grows, and as Grant stares, he bends at the waist in an ironic little bow. “My reputation precedes me, but then, it usually does,” he replies with a wave of his hand. “I suppose by now you’ve heard the entire tragic story. Very Bertha Rochester. Although admittedly, my Thornfield Hall leaves a bit to be desired.” He shakes his head. “Don’t worry. I neither bite nor set fire to things. Well, unless you’re requiring me to cook.”

His eyes twinkle in a flash of private mirth, but then he finally steps away from the nearest console—the one with the six monitors, all of them now alight with graphs and read-outs—and heads toward the holographic manipulation table. “You would think the one advantage of my so-called disorder would be that I could imagine things in stunning complexity,” he comments casually, “but I remain a bit spatially challenged. You can imagine my wife’s amusement.”

“I— Yeah,” Grant says dumbly, and McCoy chuckles to himself. The table flares to light, and immediately, his large fingers start dancing atop the glass, plucking formulas and molecular structures out of thin air. He spreads them out across the holographic area, bending and manipulating them; he squints at one, tosses it back down onto the table, and plucks out another. He works quickly, the colored lines and shapes almost blurring in Grant’s vision, and Grant finds himself frozen in place, incapable of anything except standing and staring.

McCoy’s discarding a fifth or sixth molecule before he says, “To answer your question, yes, I am allowed ‘out.’” Grant’s lips part in surprise, and the man across the room raises his head. He’s no longer smiling, but his face is round and open. For the first time, it occurs to Grant that he’s quite handsome. “I’m very well medicated, thanks mostly to Lin’s endless capacity for hope and sleepless nights. I won’t pummel you into the ground, regardless of what Agent May thinks.”

Grant swallows. “Where is she?”

“Your Agent May?”

He shakes his head. “Your wife.”

McCoy’s lips twitch into the ghost of a smile. “Asleep,” he says quietly. He twirls a molecule idly with his index finger. “She won’t admit it to any of you—excepting Phil, that is—but these last few days have shaken her. I think she looks at what these Normalizers are doing and pictures— Well.” He rolls his lips together for a moment. “I doubt you need much more subtext.”

His eyes drop away, focusing on the molecules in front of him, and silence sweeps back over the barn. Grant pushes away from the metal table, wandering aimlessly through the sea of machines and consoles. The biometric monitor displays only blank lines, placeholders where McCoy’s data should be, but a simple glance at the man reveals that he’s— Fine. He’s living, breathing, murmuring soundlessly to himself as he combines and then tears apart molecular models, but just like any other man might.

He stops near the table with Fitz-Simmons’s equipment from the Bus, and for a few minutes, he simply watches McCoy work. It’s only after he’s wet his lips for the third or fourth time, words perching on the tip of tongue, that the other man says, “Please ask.”

Grant blinks. “Excuse me?”

“You’re staring hard enough to burn a hole in my skull,” McCoy replies, a hint of a smile playing across his lips. “Either you have a question, or I am exactly your type.”

For the first time since they landed, Grant nearly laughs. “It’s definitely not the latter—no offense.”

“As I am a married man, none taken.” McCoy gathers up the whole of the molecular structure he’s just created and tosses it back onto the tabletop. Elsewhere in the barn, a printer starts buzzing. He leans his palms on the edge of the table and glances over at Grant. “Lin hates the questions,” he says, shaking his head. “She likens it to owning an exotic pet. Where do you keep him? What does he eat? All the usual nosiness. But I’d much rather answer than have my story turn into the stuff of legend.”

“Isn’t it already legend?” Grant asks, leaning his hip against Fitz-Simmons’s table.

“As are so many things.”

The printer stops buzzing, plunging the barn back into heavy silence. McCoy drops his eyes down to the tabletop, its bright lights reflecting on his glasses lenses, and Grant draws in a breath. He holds it, releases, and pulls in another; somewhere along the line, the words finally drop into order. “You live in the basement.”

“I do.”

“But you’re not—” He raises a hand, gesturing weakly, and McCoy smiles. “I’d understand this if you were in a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility, but you live with your wife in the middle of nowhere. You obviously have the run of the lab, and probably the house, too. Why would you keep yourself locked up like a—”

“Prisoner?” McCoy finishes. Grant nods, and the man’s smile falters. Sadness sweeps across his expression, but he only leans a little harder against the table. “The fact of my present freedom is not proof I deserve it. I would rather stay below and know that Lin and anyone else—visitors, passers-by, strangers I’d meet when wandering into town shoeless and half-mad—are safe than chance the alternative.”

Grant frowns. “But you’re not _unsafe_ ,” he points out, and McCoy chuckles softly. “And if you can let yourself out, nothing’s stopping you from—”

“The door features a 12-digit code that can be randomized from any console or tablet keyed to this equipment, as well as from Lin’s cellular phone,” McCoy cuts in. “Any room in our apartment downstairs can be locked down in the same manner, as can this barn itself. And I don’t need to point out that the walls and doors are reinforced, or that the windows employ ballistic glass.” He shakes his head. “I am no Doctor Banner, of course,” he says after a few quiet seconds, “but I take it on good authority that I can’t be trusted when I am not myself.”

“But doesn’t it _bother_ you?” Grant presses. He rubs a hand over the side of his neck and then crosses to the holographic manipulation table. He stands opposite Henry McCoy just like he stands opposite from any one of his team members at the display table on the Bus, his hands resting on his hips. “From the sounds of it, you’re usually yourself. Your wife keeps your immune system balanced enough so you’re not flying off the rails.” McCoy nods, his eyes steadily studying Grant’s face, and Grant sweeps out a hand. “So why? Have a bunker for when you spiral out of control, not the opposite.”

McCoy chuckles. “If only my life could be so simple.”

“From the sound of it,” Grant returns, “what you have isn’t much of a life.”

He hears the sharp edge to his tone a beat too late, and he flinches as McCoy smiles humorlessly. He pushes away from the table to cross his thick arms over his broad chest, his eyes dropping back to the tabletop. Molecules dance around on the display, behaving almost like a scientific screensaver. “Since the beginning of time,” he says quietly, “men have manipulated other men to their advantage. Military conscription, slavery, biological warfare and research— We are, as a species, hell-bent on destroying ourselves by using one another.” He shakes his head. “Think of the men who died trying to recreate Erskine’s formula—and then, of the men who did _not_ die. Think of the Extremis project, of your Centipede victims, of all the men and women manipulated and used for their bodies, or for their powers.” When he raises his eyes, they’re steady and crystal clear. “I’m home and safe, with Lin at my side. And, more importantly, I can’t hurt anyone.”

“But you’re not a monster,” Grant presses, his shoulders lifting in a loose shrug. “As far as I can tell, even after everything, you’re just a man.”

McCoy smiles softly. “You’re right in that I am not a monster,” he replies, shaking his head. “But you forget one thing.”

“Which is?”

“The fact that I easily _could_ be.”

 

==

 

Grant wakes up the next morning in the barn loft, the microfiber blanket draped over him as he lays on the surprisingly-comfortable cot. He rubs the sleep out of his eyes and rolls over to find May hovering over him, a cup of coffee in her hands.

“Skye traced the Normalizers’ web posts to a warehouse in British Columbia,” she says, holding out the mug. “We’re leaving in half an hour.”

He stops, coffee halfway to his lips, and frowns. “What about the formula? I thought the whole point of coming here was to change the Normalizers’ ‘cure’ into something workable.”

May shrugs. “Priorities change,” she replies, and heads immediately for the ladder down to the main level.

By the time Grant’s chugged down the coffee and located his jacket—strewn over the corner of the loft’s small television like in a college frat house—the barn’s already fallen victim to the usual post-mission chaos. Fitz-Simmons run between tables, shoving equipment into bags and rambling through impossible-to-follow theories while Doctor McCoy, back in jeans and a sweater, nods through the whole conversation; near the door, Coulson and Skye squint at a tablet, Skye’s fingers tracing something with her usual distracted ease. For a moment, Grant stands at the bottom of the ladder, but the intense activity sours in his stomach. He tries to picture different warehouse-infiltration strategies, but his mind wanders endlessly through the past two days, drowning him in visions of kitschy animal knick-knacks and freshly-fried bacon.

He’s still grappling with his own distraction when May stops in front of him and shoves his holster into his hands. “Twenty minutes,” she warns before she stalks off, and he forces himself to shake the cobwebs free and spring into action.

Fifteen minutes later, the SUV is packed almost to bursting, complete with a running engine and an impatient May in the driver’s seat. Grant leans against the side of the car as Fitz-Simmons and then Skye exchange breathless goodbyes with McCoy, promising to e-mail, call, text, and, in Fitz’s case, _write_. McCoy smiles through every handshake, then watches as the three younger agents—again, if Skye counts—pile into the vehicle’s back seat.

Coulson steps forward next, and when McCoy offers a hand, he wraps it in two of his. “We’ll be in touch the minute we’ve got them,” he promises, his face open and earnest. “Skye thinks she can breach their firewalls as soon as we’re within WiFi range of the building, and if that’s the case—”

“Then I’ll have my work cut out for me,” the doctor replies, and Coulson’s mouth curves into a wry smile. “I won’t stop working on this formula of theirs,” she adds after a few second, her hand slipping from his grip to slide into her back pocket. “At the very least, I want to prove that it _can’t_ work. And if it _can_ —”

“Then you’ll be the one to find it,” Coulson finishes, and he squeezes her arm before he climbs into the front passenger’s seat.

The spring wind is cold and misty as Grant steps in front of the doctor, moisture clinging to their skin and hair. This time, McCoy keeps her hands firmly rooted in her pockets, her chin raised in a silent challenge. Grant forces his lips into a smile, but the expression feels foreign, too tight along his jawline. He rolls them together for a moment, instead.

“He’s a good man,” he says after the silence between them has stretched almost to the breaking point. “I know I can’t completely understand what happened to him, or to you, but— I think underneath everything, he’s a very good man.”

McCoy nods slowly, her face carefully neutral even as she swallows. She wets her lips, then turns to glance out across the empty fields. In the distance, lightning flashes in the thick, gray clouds. “Hank once said that the cards you’re dealt in life can either create or destroy you,” she says, her voice hardly above a whisper. “Most days, I still don’t know if this has created or destroyed me, but I know what it’s done for Hank.”

Grant shrugs softly. “There’s no cure for life,” he points out.

McCoy snorts and shakes her head. “No,” she agrees, “there’s not.” 

And that’s how the mission ends, unlike any of their other missions, with the team piled into the SUV and staring out at a white farmhouse with dark green shutters and a rickety barn at the back. Katalin McCoy steps onto the driveway and watches them pull away from there, her messy hair caught in the wind. Fitz-Simmons and Skye wave at frantically until she waves back, but Grant can hardly manage a smile.

He thinks maybe, if he squints, he can see the shadow of a man standing in the front window, broad-shouldered and steady, his hand raised in a silent benediction.

Grant lifts his hand in reply.

And as they reach the highway that will return them to Peoria, it starts to rain.


End file.
